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World Hotels - The Night Watch
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List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $5.49
Your Save: $ 9.51 ( 63% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Riverhead Trade
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Riverhead Trade
Manufacturer: Riverhead Trade
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 544
Publication Date: 2006-09-27
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Studio: Riverhead Trade
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Editorial Reviews:
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Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners-three women and a young man with a past-whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: dull, dull, duller
Comment:
I try to finish all my books to the bitter end, but I had an especially hard time with this one. Waters departs from her Victorian underworld lesbian heroines to explore well, I don't really know, but I'm sure the War has something to do with it. The intertwining stories of Helen, Viv, and Duncan are told backwards (a lot less interesting than one would think) which allows you to get just invested enough in the present day characters that you start to care about where they're going rather than where they've been. Waters writes beautifully, but I can't help but think that this story lets her characters down. All the straight men are morally suspect if not morally weak. The lesbian love triangle is predictable (fyi when your girlfriend introduces you to another woman it's highly likely they were romantically involved). The war is just a pretense here to make things go not very far.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Intense and captivating
Comment: This is the first Sarah Waters novel I have picked up and, I have to say, I have no doubt about her qualifications for being a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. "The Night Watch" was masterfully written and each of her characters came across as being distinct and separate individuals. Although the story is told backwards, from 1947 to 1941, the reader is not left feeling as though something gravely important is being withheld. Each timeframe operates on its own as story and, even though the rest of the tale is illuminating, a piece can be held as a complete entity. The way the pieces are tied together at the end, however, are well worth the wait and add quite a bit to the plotline and character development. Waters's writing is beautiful in its descriptions and feelings, almost as though she had a direct eye on the events surrounding the war. This is no rose-tinted commentary on human nature, but gritty and dirty beauty.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 4.5 out of 5: Tender and extraordinarily intimate
Comment: Moving backwards in time, the story covers the lives of four Londoners during WWII (2 women and 1 man, all gay except for one straight woman). The lives connect and intersect in surprising and revealing ways. Tender and extraordinarily intimate with the backdrop of brutal war.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lesbians in Wartime London
Comment: To start with, before people start throwing things at me, let me say that I realize that the set of main characters here includes some males and a heterosexual woman. However the stories of these characters are, at least for me, quite banal, and the book would have been better off without them. The main story here, for me at least, concerns the three lesbians Helen, Julia, and Kay.
I have not read any of Sarah Waters other books, but I get the feeling that this was her first book, and that she was originally unable to publish it. Then, after the success of her other books, I believe, she resubmitted this book (perhaps because of a contractual obligation) and the publisher accepted it. It's a weak book. As several other reviewers have mentioned, there is no real plot, and because of this even the three main characters never reach their potential.
The book is divided into three main sections, in reverse chronological order. The first section, set in 1947, is about 175 pages long, and is almost a sort of prelude. Ideally, it ought to intrigue the reader, making the reader want to get to the two subsequent, chronologically earlier sections to find out how these characters got into their 1947 situation. Unfortunately, though, this 1947 situation is not very interesting, so the reader is not all that intrigued.
And this is the problem with the whole backwards structure of the book. The reader gradually learns the original story behind all those things in the first two (but later in time) sections of the book which the author intended to be so mysterious. But they these later events are only mildly puzzling, not intriguing, so by the time one gets to the explanations, the reader has almost forgotten them. Or at least that was true for me.
The last section of the book, set in 1941, is only about fifty pages long, and certainly has the most intense story.
One can see why the author couldn't tell the story in chronological order, because that would have put all the most interesting interactions at the beginning of the book and then the remainder of the novel would have been a long anti-climax. The novel would have been a story of some characters who have some very intense experiences during the the London blitz, and then gradually grow older and have lives that become fairly ordinary. The usual way to handle a problem like this would be to start with the recent part of the story and then tell the older material in a series of flashbacks. Presumably the author originally tried this but couldn't make it work.
The thing is that this is not a book whose main interest comes from the story line. But there are some very vivid scenes in the wartime sections, especially the long scene where Helen and Julia go out for a very dangerous walk in London during the blackout with the bombs falling. (A scene that's even more interesting because Helen is cheating on Kay. If the reader remembers from the first section of the book, one will be aware that Helen will eventually break up with Kay and become in a committed relationship with Julia.) These scenes, and some of the interactions between the characters, are what make the book worth reading. But it's hard to keep reading when there's no strong strong plot that makes the reader keep thinking, "I've got to find out what happens next."
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good but not Great
Comment: This novel is interesting in concept -- going backwards through time to delve into how a set of characters ended up where they are at. And the backdrop of war time Britain is marvelously dark and wrought with peril. At the same time, I was disappointed by the lack of true depth to the characters. Unlike other novels by this author, it is more difficult in this novel to dive into the characters' heads. Perhaps Viv is the most fleshed out of the lot, and even then, it takes a bit of work. Duncan, Helen, Kay all fall a bit flat. I kept hoping to capture more of their spirit. A much better novel by this author would be "Affinity" which plumbs the depths of the characters' psyches and delivers a delicious twist in the end. Perhaps that is why I was a bit disappointed with "The Night Watch" -- while it is a decent enough creation, it doesn't linger on the mind the way I've come to expect from such a talented author.
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